Spurs-Lakers series note: San Antonio needs to stay aggressive

Spurs defense puts clamps on Dwight Howard, Pau Gasol

San Antonio Spurs' Tim Duncan, right, talks with teammate Tony Parker during the first half of Game 1 of an NBA playoffs basketball game against the Los Angeles Lakers, Sunday, April 21, 2013, in San Antonio, Texas. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)

SAN ANTONIO - The aggressiveness that the San Antonio Spurs played with this in this game was key in helping them come out with a win; they got after it when defending the Lakers' pick-and-rolls, they held their own on the glasses against an extremely tall Los Angeles team (the Lakers only won the rebounding battle by one, 44-43) and their game plan against Dwight Howard and Pau Gasol post-ups was to be extremely physical with them prior to the catch and to even front them on occasion.

"On the defensive end everybody was focused on stopping Gasol and Dwight," Tony Parker said of San Antonio's attentiveness to LA's star bigs. "We tried to help as much as we can and go as hard as we can on them."

"Best defense we've played in a long time," Tim Duncan added. "We've had a couple of games in a row where we looked awful. It was great to have everybody back out there and focused."

The Spurs were able to make entry passes, a usually simple task, a difficult assignment for the Lakers' perimeter players. When their bigs were fronted, the Lakers reversed the ball to Gasol at the foul line to have him make an entry pass over the top, and over the course of the game that seemed to be the only thing that worked for Los Angeles when the Spurs were overplaying. Then again, Gasol ended up with six turnovers on the game, mostly because the Spurs' bigs read the lob entry pass and did a great job of taking the ball out of the air.

When Howard and Gasol were actually able to get good position in the post and were waiting on the entry pass from Metta World Peace or Steve Nash on the outside, the Spurs had their bigs aggressively shove their off arm in front of their man, a common NBA practice, but San Antonio's pack of post defenders are all so good at timing those passes that they were able to tip the ball away several times. And if Howard and Gasol actually got their hands on the ball and had a chance to make a move, the Spurs sent smart double teams and dig downs in order to make them uncomfortable down low, and the Lakers never made them pay by kicking the ball out and swinging it around the perimeter to find the open man.

When you start making it tough on players to simply touch the ball, specifically a post player, they are going to get frustrated, and there was a play in the second half when Duncan tipped the ball away from Howard that showcased this. Because the Spurs had been doing this so frequently, Dwight reacted nonchalantly to Duncan's deflection, slumping his shoulders while using his body in attempt to box Duncan out as the ball rolled towards the sideline. But instead of quitting on the play, Duncan stayed after it and defeated an apathetic Howard to the ball and tossing it off his foot to gain the Spurs an extra possession.

When asked about trying to get the ball into the paint, Lakers guard Steve Blake said that they pressed too much at times to make those entry passes.

"There were a few times where we forced things that caused turnovers," Blake said. "A couple times I went to make a pass and I just lost it. I'm pretty sure that happened to a couple of guys."

Even Steve Nash had some trouble making precise entry passes in this game, so you know the Lakers had a lot of trouble deciphering when and where to locate the ball so that San Antonio's bigs couldn't get their hands on the ball.

When I asked Dwight Howard about the aggressive way that San Antonio's bigs played in the post, he was very emphatic in saying that he doesn't think this strategy will hold up over the course of the series.

"They were very aggressive tonight," Howard, who had 20 points on 8-of-12 shooting, said. "As the series goes on, those bigs will wear down from trying to fight for every possession. We've just got to do a good job, myself and Pau, of not getting offensive fouls, not try to fight back too much. If they front, we have things set up to where we can counter that. We'll do a better job next game."

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Had this game resulted in a Laker victory, then the job Steve Blake did on Tony Parker defensively would have become a national storyline. Instead, it's a causality of Los Angeles' disappointing offensive performance. It's still worth discussing, though, because an individual defender shutting down Parker has been an extremely rare occurrence over the past couple of seasons, and yet Blake has been able to pull it off in back-to-back games dating back to the Spurs' game with the Lakers last Sunday.

Parker was 1-of-10 in that regular season meeting and he was just 8-of-21 last night. Blake just seemed to be a step ahead of Parker on every possession, almost as if Blake could see into the future and knew exactly what dribble move or shot attempt Parker was about to use. Every time Parker came off a pick or attempted to drive by him, Blake was there to shutoff his lane to the basket and to offer a strong contest, which are two things Parker is not used to dealing with.

Blake is a player who has to be in the perfect spot on every play just to stay in front of someone as fast as Parker, and the exactness of Blake's positioning yesterday is something worth fawning over. It can't be said enough how rare it is for Parker to get only a handful of clean drives to the rim in a game, and yet Steve Blake, a universally unheralded defender, has mustered every fiber of his being in order to wall off Parker, and it's working. And, to top things off on his masterful day, there was an end-to-end sequence in the third quarter when Blake forced Parker to miss a tough 10 footer, got the ball on offense, isolated against Parker on the left baseline, crossed him over and hit a stepback jumper.

Mike D'Antoni, who cited Blake's defense on Parker as a reason for him starting alongside Steve Nash in this game, told me he was happy with the performance Blake gave on that end of the floor, as was Blake himself.

"I was pretty pleased with that," Blake said of his defense on one of the league's best point guards. "We did a good job as a team sticking to our coverages. When he got into the lane I was able to contest and get some deflections on the ball. We did a pretty good job on him."

As I mentioned in my game story, while forcing Parker into such a poor performance is usually something worth jumping for joy over, the fact that the Lakers weren't able to come out with a win kind of wastes Blake's sublime performance. It would be a big surprise if the Lakers were able to slow down Parker a third straight time in game two, but they can at least take solace in the effectiveness of their defensive scheme thus far.

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While 79 points is obviously a disappointing outcome for D'Antoni's team, the Lakers coach was happy about the looks his team got.

"I was happy about the shots we got tonight," D'Antoni said. "I wasn't happy with the turnovers we had. To me that was the difference in the game."

D'Antoni is right in his assessment that Los Angeles' turnovers were more concerning about the shots his offense produced. The Lakers turned the ball over 18 times, leading to 14 points for the Spurs, and they actually shot better as a team than the Spurs did (41% to 38%). I think the Lakers will be happy with Gasol and Nash getting open 18-footers and those are the looks they were getting in this game out of their pick-and-pop attack. The problem was simply that Gasol and Nash weren't making those shots.

It's certainly true that Gasol needs to go to the block more and to be more aggressive there instead of passing it back out, especially when the Spurs insult him by having Matt Bonner guard him, but when San Antonio is sending hard double teams at him there, it's not a bad idea to give him clean looks at the rim from the mid-range because he's traditionally been an elite shooter from that range.

Gasol has had off shooting nights before in his career and been able to rebound on a game-to-game basis. More concerning is Nash and his misses from the mid-range; Nash isn't just an elite shooter from that distance, he may very well be the greatest mid-range shooter of all-time and he consistently makes over 50% of his shots from 16-23 feet. But yesterday his shots were way off, and after the game he said he didn't feel like himself. Pop joked before the game that Nash was still a scary player to face because "he hasn't forgotten how to shoot."

Well, Nash may not have forgotten how to shoot, but it's possible that his body simply won't let him perform like he used to. We're talking about a 39-year old that had to take two epidural shots just to get ready for the playoffs and he's still not moving like himself. Yesterday was the perfect opportunity for the Lakers to steal a road game in this series, and with game one in the books as a Spurs win and Nash finally showing his age, it's hard to envision this series much longer than the necessary four games.